Trivia / Blue Valentine

• The Cast Showoff: Ryan Gosling wrote and performed some songs by himself.
• Doing It for the Art: Derek Cianfrance said that he had given up his entire director's fee to help fund the film: "I mean, it came down to we were exactly my fee short. They paid me and I just paid it back. So I still have to pay taxes on it, you know. So I actually had to pay to make the movie."
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • When filming the argument scenes, Derek Cianfrance gave instructions to Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling individually, without the knowledge of the other, in order to create more tension between Dean and Cindy. For Williams, Cianfrance would instruct her to try to leave the room, use any way to break out of the argument with Gosling, etc. For Gosling, Cianfrance would tell him to use any means to persuade, get Williams attention, etc. Gosling stated it was a new and interesting process as it became a tug game on set.
  • For the scene where Gosling and Williams sing and dance in front of the bridal boutique, Cianfrance told them to keep their talents hidden from each other so that when they improvised the scene, their revelations to each other would appear spontaneous.
  • The scene when Dean threatens to jump off the bridge while climbing the chain fence was not in the script. Gosling had to seek a way to make Cindy reveal her pregnancy.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: Derek Cianfrance spent twelve years making the movie; he started working on the script in 1998. During that process, Cianfrance said that he wrote about sixty-seven drafts, mostly each one containing content added/modified based on on-set improvisations, inspirational encounters, etc., while he worked on several documentaries to secure more funding for the movie.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams improvised dialogue; the scene in which their characters wander through New York together was unscripted, for example.
• Method Acting: The scenes in the "past" when Dean and Cindy are falling in love were shot first, in three weeks. After this, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams spent a month together in a rented house to age themselves in preparation for the "present" scenes. They spent a lot of their time grocery shopping, cooking dinner and learning to pick fights with each other.
• What Could Have Been: In 2015, Rachel Weisz revealed to The Playlist that at one point, she and Jeremy Renner were supposed to be in this movie but it did not work out for either of them.
• Write What You Know:
  • The inspiration for the film was the divorce of director Derek Cianfrance's parents when he was twenty years old. He was so devastated that he wanted to do a film that would help him figure out how a relationship began and ended.
  • Cindy tells Dean that he has potential in life because of his artistic talents. The argument about potentiality was based on a talk between director Derek Cianfrance and his wife about getting the film made for many years.

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